Wench Is Dead? / Miscast for Murder

THE WENCH IS DEAD…

Dene is on vacation, staying with her married friends Vera and Sam at their Long Island summer retreat. It is here she meets Paul Debrulet, a tall, handsome and somewhat mysterious man who lives on the estate. The attraction is immediate. But Paul seems to be a man with a secret, and try as she can, Dene can’t figure out what it is. Then Lt. Gridley Nelson’s wife, Kyrie, joins the group for a dinner party, and she recognizes Debrulet—he looks just like an accused wife-killer whose picture she’d seen in one of her son’s true crime magazines. When an accidental hit-and-run death occurs at party’s end, it begins to look like Paul is involved… in fact, it begins to look a lot like murder.

MISCAST FOR MURDER

Bess Rohan had lived a sheltered life with her divorced mother, so when she moves to New York City, nothing prepares her for Link Bassett, the TV and radio personality who finagles her into lunch with him. Nor is she prepared to see Kevin Culhane, the once-famous singer, seated with an attractive young lady nearby. Culhane is the father who left her as a child. The day becomes stranger still as she stands outside her father’s hotel room… unaware that inside, lying face down on the bed, is the body of the young lady Culhane had been having lunch with—strangled to death. And now it becomes the task of Lt. Gridley Nelson to determine whether her estranged father is as guilty of murder as he appears!

Ruth Fenisong was born Ruth Feinsong on April 29, 1904 in New York City, the child of Jewish immigrants. During the Thirties she was employed by the Federal Theater Project, writing and staging plays, often with a Leftist slant. Fenisong began her mystery career during World War II with Murder Needs a Name, featuring Lieutenant Gridley Nelson, the Princeton-educated son of an upscale family who decides he wants to be a cop. Nelson was the hero of thirteen mysteries by Fenisong, written between 1942 and 1962. New York Times critic Anthony Boucher frequently praised her novels, singling Nelson out as a “quietly perceptive detective.” Fenisong lived for years in Greenwich Village with her life partner Kathleen Gallagher, an English teacher from Ireland, often traveling to Europe together and other locales together. Fenisong died in September 1978 in New York.